the lacings on her boots. She pulled them off and set them on the rug. “Which garbage are they in?”
“The kitchen. She cleans it up before she finishes reading the news.”
Katya searched Magdalene in wonder. “How do you know all this?”
“I’ve lived here much longer than I’ve worked these crazy carnival hours. I used to see her do it every night. If there was a paper in the house, this is what she’d do with it.”
Katya grabbed a book of matches from the dresser. She struck one and lit a small glass lamp from the dresser. “Wait for me. I’ll be right back.”
Katya slipped out of the room and took all the care she needed to close the door with only the slightest bump. She hurried to the front staircase where she could disturb only one person, the gently snoring Mrs. Weeks. The other front room belonged to the awake and elsewhere Magdalene. Katya descended the stairs almost silently, not stopping when she reached the first floor. She continued into the basement, the air noticeably cooler against her skin. She turned and entered the first room on the right, a spacious kitchen stocked with everything Mrs. Weeks needed to cook for her boarders. The fireplace sat cold and dark.
Katya had not visited the kitchen for anything but her afternoon hair curling for months. She was grateful the lidded trash bin was easy to see, tucked under the edge of the large prep table. She slid it out and set the cover on the table. Like Magdalene predicted, Mrs. Weeks’ newspaper sat neatly folded on top of the fragrant garbage. For the second time that night, Katya reached into the trash and lifted out something valuable.
The headline shouted, Bell’s Latest Experiment Another Failure . In smaller letters beneath it, bolded words elaborated, Alexander Graham Bell insists he will perfect the machine that could replace the telegraph, but a decade of failures leaves many skeptical.
A pang of homesickness struck Katya for New York and the family she had left behind. She remembered her parents talking about Alexander Bell when she was a girl and how close he thought he came to passing the human voice through telegraph wires. Even though a widely publicized accident with battery acid scarred his hands almost beyond use, his assistant Thomas Watson stood by him through every experiment while their benefactors came and went. Katya wished more than ever someone would invent something better than the telegraph. Letters and telegrams took too long for her youthful impatience, and she would have welcomed the chance to hear her mother’s voice from so far away.
Katya pulled the middle sheets of the newspaper out and left the outer pages in the garbage. She eased the lid onto the bin and crept back to the stairs. She climbed them, careful to keep the newspaper away from the flame in the lamp. With a little maneuvering, Katya freed a few fingers from the newspaper and opened the door to her room.
Magdalene sat in the corner chair, staring intently at the drawings in the notebook.
Katya closed the door. “You wrap it, and I’ll make room.”
Katya passed the newspaper to Magdalene and crossed the room to the dresser. She set the glass lamp aside and rearranged the contents of her drawers, listening to the crisp crinkling of the newspaper behind her.
Magdalene carried over the tightly wrapped notebook and set it in the empty drawer. “It’s such a shame. It should be on display somewhere, not hidden in here.”
Katya blew out the light in the lamp and returned it to its place on the dresser. “I know, but it’s too dangerous for that now.”
“Maybe Mr. Warden is dangerous, which means the carnival will be dangerous as long as he owns it.”
Katya pushed the drawer closed, shutting the package out of sight. “Mr. Warden can’t be all bad, or he wouldn’t need Mr. Lieber to do things for him.”
“That’s who you’re really afraid of, isn’t it? Mr. Lieber?”
Katya nodded stiffly.
“Have you told Mr. Warden he